South Carolina Motorcycle Rights Association

And we’re back. Congress returned from their traditional five week summer district work period this week, with sort of a whimper. With lots of backlog on news of jobs (there aren’t any), foreign acts of terrorism (there are a lot), and not to mention the looming November elections, one would think that it would have been a busy week. It hasn’t been and its not likely to be busy. The Congress is planning an unprecedented event, adjourning early. In my days on the hill we would be is session until late December in election years with no adjournment to speak of. So this move to send all the politicians back to their home districts to campaign like crazy, shows how important this election is. Target adjournment is September 23rd.

Speaking of elections, this is where I encourage you to join a campaign, any campaign! There are lots of state wide Senate toss up races that could dramatically shift the control of the Senate. I'll leave it up to you as to whether a new Senate majority would be good or bad.

You likely saw my release earlier about the TIGER grants or Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recover grants. The TIGER grants are a holdover from the failed stimulus package of 2009. Here's my “thing about” TIGER grants. They don’t work to address national transportation needs and they are highly political. TIGER grants allow the Secretary of Transportation to doll out 600 million a year with very little oversight. The money is petered away on small scale projects that impact a handful of users. Things like bike paths, electric vehicle corridors and street cars are the recipients of the award money instead of big ticket items such as major congestion issues and multimodal projects. One grant is even going for a walking path. I guess walking is technically transportation but c’mon! The grants or as they should be called, gifts are supposed to also create jobs, which after all was the main goal of the stimulus package in the first place. So far there has been zero evidence that this grant program has created any jobs. I participated in a conference call with the Secretary on Friday and he blamed Congress for not passing a large scale spending bill, which is definitely part of the problem with our nations infrastructure.

I hope everyone is gearing up for MOTM!

Jeff Hennie